This article was written by The Zillennial Zine’s senior fall editorial intern Arianna Nahim. Find her on Instagram at @ariannanahim. If you would like to share an article with The Zillennial, send us an email at thezillennialzine@gmail.com.
Every year since 2015, millions have waited in great anticipation for their Spotify Wrapped. This extensive and often very unique summary of users listening history is something that keeps Spotify users and arguably the reason a lot of newer users have joined. It’s a cultural phenomenon, used for small talk and dissecting a person’s personality just by what their favorite song seemed to be that year.
In the past years, Spotify Wrapped has never struggled with keeping users excited with their imaginative summary of listening history. Last year, users were able to see what city matched their listening profile. That same year users were also labeled as what type of listener they were. They could be “The Archer,” constantly hunting for the right song, reflecting their habits of skipping songs until they find just what they were looking for. Some users were labeled, “The Time Traveller,” for listeners who tend to listen to that one song, reflecting them always going back in time in a sense.
It’s clear that Spotify is no stranger to delivering content that patrons everywhere have thoroughly enjoyed. The company no doubt has people working all year long to deliver such original ideas. However, on the Wednesday that almost everyone seems to have been waiting for, subscribers were less than impressed.
A LESS THAN IMPRESSIVE WRAP
This year Spotify came out later than usual this year, and for no good reason it seems. Fans of the wrap had hypothesized that perhaps Spotify was going to yet again exceed expectations with this delayed release, yet they were disappointed.
Spotify wrapped this year was so underwhelming and doesn’t even hold a candle to its predecessors. While the big shoes to fill could be an excuse it really isn’t considering they’e risen to the challenge before. Additionally, the sheer lack of effort shown in this years wrap doesn’t reflect authentic effort at all, which leads me to my next argument.
AI FLOURISHES WHILE CREATIVITY IS SUFFOCATED
In 2023 Spotify chose to lay off a number of employees in favor of pushing their highly advanced AI machines. CNN reports:
“But after three rounds of layoffs in one year: 590 positions in January, 200 in June, and another 1,500 this week, Spotify’s investments into AI to boost margins for its podcasting and audiobook divisions look like a complete overhaul in strategy that Wall Street seems confident can work.
“Spotify is leveraging AI across its platform,”
Many subscribers have put two and two together and have shared their conspiracies on several social forums like Twitter, that the very employees let go were indeed the ones who collaborated and produced quality wraps every year. In the current professional climate society has little patience for content so clearly pushed out by AI. Millions in various fields fear that soon their jobs will also be taken over by AI, yet one would think that jobs requiring a human imagination would not be so easily toppled.
THE COCA-COLA CHRISTMAS AD INCIDENT
Three weeks ago, Coca-Cola decided to relase a revamped version of their famous Christmas ad from the 1990’s. But, this year something seemed…. off. Between the .9 second clips, odd and jumpy scene transitions, viewers were left confused, but very quickly understood what was happening.
Coca-Cola is now one of the many companies who have let AI enter their mainstream content in an abundantly clear fashion. Needless to say, viewers did not shy away from openly mocking the ad all over Twitter. It’s very clear from the complaints that society does not wish for computers to take up every aspect of their life and that they do value the novelty only humans have. Circling back to the issues regarding jobs, choosing AI is just another way corporations are moving around hiring and compensating actual people for their labor.
SPOTIFY’S OBSESSION WITH AI
Spotify has not just suddenly incorporated AI into their streaming services. For a couple of months now, users have had the option to AI-generate playlist images through the app, taking away any bit of creativity people may have left. It went even farther with this years wrap where users were able to listen to two AI generated podcasters discuss their listening habits in what can only be described as shallow and creepy.
SPOTIFY INTRUDES ON ETHICAL RIGHTS
I was able to discuss a fellow student’s research paper here at Virginia Tech. Bruno Zegada is currently a junior majoring in Computer Science and is focusing on collaborating on research centered around language model machine learning.
Zegada explained to me that over the past few years Spotify has acquired a patent that uses an artificial intelligence-based voice recognition system. The system utilizes users voice to recognize things like mood, environment, and gender.
“The case also brings ethical concerns regarding recommendation algorithms because of the ethical implication of promoting bias. It also talks about the amount of data it is gathering from a user, which is controversial. Their algorithm considers personal information such as private playlists, history, and searches to make recommendations. If they were to implement their recently accepted patent, huge ethical concerns would arise with the amount of data they are gathering. Their new patent would be considering human emotion and a user’s mood using voice recognition. This would cause gender discrimination, misidentifying transgender, and nonbinary people based on their voice tone. They could also use their algorithm to manipulate a user’s emotions. Additionally, their dataset would be a gold mine for a third party making the data incredibly valuable. This case is within the computer science field because it talks about artificial intelligence techniques such as recommendation systems.”
Spotify and other companies are only looking to expand into the field of AI. Despite the obvious disdain from the public, it seems companies persist that this is the technology of the future and should be utilized. While this is true, these “oh so advanced” machines haven’t really been praised for the quality content they’ve produced. On the contrary, the only reactions from customers seem to range from disappointment to total uproars.
What did you think of Spotify Wrap this year? Let us know by commenting below.
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